Palestinians have achieved three consecutive victories in the last few months. In October 2011, there was the release of prisoners (the exchange deal involving the kidnapped Israeli soldier).

Then there was a series of individual hunger strikes, which lasted for unparalleled periods of time. These began with Khader Adnan, who went on hunger strike to protest against the Israeli policy of administrative detention.

Adnan’s action spurred an open-ended hunger strike by prisoners, started by more than a thousand prisoners on 17 April. It ended on 14 May, with more than 2,000 prisoners taking part. The strike began a new page in the history of the Palestinian struggle for liberation, written by the prisoners along with their Arab and international supporters.

The agreement signed on 14 May 2012 between the authorities in charge of the strike and Israel — with Egyptian and international mediation and guarantees — confirmed that the prisoner movement not only scored a major achievement, but realized a clear victory. We can now speak of two periods, the before and after, with the watershed moment being the hunger strike of 2012.

Clear aims, coordination and preparation

From the beginning, the strike had several strong points. The most important of these was the clarity of its aims — key goals achievable through struggle and determination. These goals fused with the significant and highly conscious coordination between the prisoners on strike and those leading it inside the prisons, and between the latter and the wider political authorities outside.

Strong points became clear. There was no detailed involvement with everyday demands and issues. Thereby, a situation was avoided where larger aims would become entangled with specific demands. This tied the hands of the occupation, which could not manipulate these aims.

A huge role was also played by the strong, clear approach to the media taken by the leadership of the strike, while Israel failed in its attempts to broadcast a contrary view. There was also an accurate reading of Palestinian, Arab and international realities. A central goal was determined through prior planning — the possibility of reviving the Palestinian popular movement and making the most of the significant Egyptian role as a principal party to support the strike and guarantee the achievement of its goals. This risk proved worthwhile as was evident in the Egyptian sponsorship of the agreement to end the strike.

Another significant achievement was the clear preparation and the impressive readiness of the international solidarity movements to launch their campaigns all over the world, particularly in Europe and America, to support the prisoners in their fight for freedom. They declared 17 April as Palestinian Prisoners’ Day.

This resulted in international public pressure in favor of the Palestinians’ right to confront the collusion of their government with the Israeli occupiers. These movements adopted a clear discourse on the humanitarian and political rights demanded by the prisoners. They also proved the importance of cumulative efforts to internationalize the cause of the prisoners and the cause of Palestine.

The strike adopted an approach which has blown the policy of “postponement” — imposed by Israel with official American and European support — out of the water. This is what happened in Oslo, where crucial components of the Palestinian issue were postponed to fit the policy of dictation and domination over the Palestinian leadership.

One of the issues postponed under that formula was the release of prisoners, but this too was brought back to the top of the official Palestinian agenda by the strike. The strikers refused to accept that the prisoners were pawns under the mercy of the occupation.

The strike also succeeded in neutralizing the negative effect of Israeli public opinion by not addressing it at all. This is because if it had moved, it would have gone against the just demands of the prisoners. It is a colonialist public opinion, extremely hostile to Palestinian rights, and therefore cannot support its own victims.

Only one victorious side

There is a difference between achieving specific matters within a wider set of demands and achieving all the goals of a decisive act of struggle. There is also a difference between a clear victory and a case in which each side thinks they’ve won. The outcome of the strike, as expressed in the agreement, is clear — there is only one victorious side, the prisoners.

This was the first time that negotiations were carried out directly with those involved in the case. It is also the first time a decision has been made by the occupier — the General Security Service (Shabak or Shin Bet) — not the Israeli Prison Service, which in the scale of Israeli oppression is just a subcontractor of the Shabak and the security services.

The strike neutralized the Israeli Prison Service and the longer it went on the more direct the dealings with the principal player, the Shabak, became. This is because of the strength of the strike and its solid basis. It forced the Israeli apparatus to reveal itself, because it limited its ability to manipulate and maneuver.

But the most important issue here is the success of the strike in removing the strategic oppression tools the Shabak has used for decades, particularly the laws of administrative detention and solitary confinement in prisons. In this way, the rules of a deeply rooted, coercive game were broken.

As a result of its strength, the strike also revealed the hostility and criminality of the Israeli judicial system, which since its conception has been an instrument to whitewash the racist colonialist project, the Israeli state’s crimes. It gave them legitimacy, justifying administrative procedures, the British mandate’s emergency laws, and continuous solitary confinement, all under the guise of security. And here we saw the Shabak forced to back down over some of them, confirming that the Israeli judicial system played and still plays the role of “palace guards” for the ruling security apparatus.

As for the popular international movement, which turned into official efforts, the Arab role, particularly the Egyptian, and the carrying out of multi-sided negotiations (the prisoners, Israel, Egypt and international pressure) — all these created a new atmosphere, an equation more akin to real negotiations than simply an occupying country dealing with its victims. The strike also confirmed that Israel’s power is not absolute, that its strength and sway can crumble in the face of targeted Palestinian efforts.

Although the strike included no more than a third of the prisoners, with Hamas being the most heavily represented, this in no way weakens its legitimacy. There might have been an argument prior to the strike about declaring it officially, but the moment it began, it became the prisoners’ strike. It became the responsibility of those prisoners taking part in it, and even those who were not, to make it succeed, support it, and share responsibility for it.

The strike proved that when our people or the prisoners’ movement engage in large-scale battles with the occupying oppressive state, the whole nation gets involved.

It is worth confirming that support for the Palestinian cause and Palestinian rights in their entirety is above political factions, rendering such divisions marginal and the people united. When the struggle of our people in Galilee, the Triangle, the Naqab desert and the coast meets with that in Jerusalem, Gaza, the West Bank and those in exile, all boundaries between our people dissolve.

Mobilizing every corner of the homeland

Reconciliation is not the goal of the Palestinian people, it is the responsibility of the political factions involved. The goals of the Palestinian people are return, freedom, liberating the homeland and the people, and self-determination. What is more important than reconciliation is the unity of the struggle and its integration on the basis of the fundamentals of Palestinian rights, not on curtailing them.

This is where the strike succeeded in mobilizing an unprecedented Palestinian movement in every corner of the homeland. With the support of the international movement, this turned the equation on its head in the last stages of the strike, when the prisoners became the ones holding the occupiers and the prisons under siege.

The Palestinian popular movement was followed by an important and effective movement. The initiative launched by the prisoners’ affairs ministry, the freed prisoners, the leadership of the Palestinian Authority and the Palestine Liberation Organization is a promising model for overcoming factional divisions.

It is now clear that coordination is possible, roles can be complementary, even if the divisions continue. It is clear that the unity of the goal and the people over the prisoners’ struggle is the basis. This is an integrated working model which is capable of achieving victories.

In his last speech in February 1965, Malcolm X said: “The only thing power respects is power.” This is one of the most important lessons of the strike. How do we create this power through determination and justice, and how do we use it well as prisoners and as a people? We must not forget that the most important goal of the prisoners, and the people, is freedom, and that requires more power. The hunger strike in 2012 is a victory on the road to freedom.

Ameer Makhoul is a Palestinian civil society leader and political prisoner at Gilboa Prison.

]]>https://ameermakhoul.wordpress.com/2012/05/05/ameer-makhoul-sigue-sacudiendo-los-cimientos-del-apartheid-israeli-despues-de-dos-anos-de-carcel-jillian-kestler-damours-the-electrinic-intifada-jerusalem-3-de-mayo-20/feed/0ameermakhoulAmeer Makhoul: still shaking the foundations of Israeli apartheid after 2 years in jailhttps://ameermakhoul.wordpress.com/2012/05/05/ameer-makhoul-still-shaking-the-foundations-of-israeli-apartheid-after-2-years-in-jail/
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“It’s not [just] one issue, the political prisoners; it became our life,” said Abdu, a prominent Palestinian human rights activist, mother of two daughters and wife of Ameer Makhoul, a Palestinian community leader serving a nine-year sentence in an Israeli prison.

“It’s so hard because you live it every day. You live the pain, but you live the struggle. I don’t have any choices. I don’t have two or three choices. The one, only choice that I have is to struggle and to continue,” Abdu said.

This weekend (6 May) marks the two-year anniversary of Makhoul’s arrest. Makhoul was the director of Ittijah, the Union of Arab Community-Based Associations, a network for Palestinian organizations in Israel.

Sixteen agents of the Israeli internal security agency, also known as the Shin Bet or Shabak, arrested Makhoul during a 3am raid on his Haifa home in 2010. They confiscated his family’s computers, cell phones and many personal effects, and proceeded to search the Ittijah offices.

“It was a traumatic arrest for [myself] and for my daughters. [They spent] two weeks not seeing their father. I lost my two parents during the month of [Ameer’s] jailing and I wasn’t able to even see Ameer or hug him. My daughter graduated from school without her father beside her. When you speak about the personal level, it’s so hard,” Abdu told The Electronic Intifada.

Incommunicado

Makhoul was held incommunicado in Israeli detention for 12 days and denied access to a lawyer. Three weeks after his arrest, he was charged with a slew of security offenses. The Israeli authorities claimed that Makhoul made contact with an agent with the Lebanese resistance movement Hizballah.

Despite having examined almost a dozen computer hard drives and more than 30,000 phone conversations, the Israeli authorities relied entirely on Makhoul’s confession as the basis for its indictment against him. And this confession, his lawyers and family say, was obtained under circumstances of torture.

As a result of the plea deal, the charge of assistance to the enemy in a time of war, which carries with it a life sentence, was dropped. Makhoul was eventually sentenced to nine years in prison and one year suspended sentence in late January 2011.

Various international human rights groups strongly condemned Makhoul’s treatment during his arrest, interrogation and imprisonment.

Jailed for defending rights

“Ameer Makhoul’s jailing is a very disturbing development and we will be studying the details of the sentencing as soon as we can,” Philip Luther, Amnesty International’s Middle East and North Africa deputy director, said in a statement following Makhoul’s sentencing (“Palestinian human rights activist jailed in Israel,” Amnesty International, 30 January 2011).

“Ameer Makhoul is well known for his human rights activism on behalf of Palestinians in Israel and those living under Israeli occupation. We fear that this may be the underlying reason for his imprisonment,” Luther continued.

Aid and solidarity groups that worked with Makhoul in his capacity as the director of Ittijah have also raised concerns about the fairness of his trial and the legitimacy of his sentence.

“We do not consider this trial as a transparent and clear trial that conforms with international standards, so anything that comes out from such a process, it’s difficult to consider this a fair verdict,” said Mieke Zagt, program officer for ICCO, an inter-church anti-poverty organization based in the Netherlands.

Zagt explained that while knowing the true motives behind Makhoul’s arrest and detention may never be known, his treatment has had a tangible impact on other human rights activists.

“Definitely it has an impact on many people around Ameer. It’s really frightening people, and we felt until now that people feel intimidated by this process,” she told The Electronic Intifada.

“We want to keep the spotlight on him. We need to remember him, especially for what he symbolizes. The fact that he addresses Palestinian unity, [that] he is reaching out to inside [Israel], the Diaspora, West Bank, Gaza, makes him special and it’s also something that inspired us.”

Putting a face and name to prisoners

“Ameer represents a man fighting for his rights and the rights of all the Palestinian people. We thought it was important to put a face and name to the prisoners,” said Maria Manrique, an activist with the Palestine Solidarity Platform in Seville, Spain, which has campaigned around Makhoul’s case.

“His work began to be a threat to the Israeli government’s plans to expel [the] Arab community outside [of] Israel. Throughout Ameer’s judicial process [it] was demonstrated once again that justice and military courts in Israel are a farce. And above all, we had the absolute conviction that Ameer had not committed any crime, therefore people got involved to ask for his freedom,” Manrique told The Electronic Intifada.

According to Janan Abdu, international solidarity is crucial in the struggle for the rights of not just Makhoul, but of all Palestinian political prisoners.

“It’s so important that the families feel that they’re not alone, that it’s not just their personal problem or issue because it’s not. Truly, it’s not. The family pays the individual price by the jailing, but all the families are part of the Palestinian people and the collective of prisoners,” Abdu said.

“The Palestinian political prisoners who are in jail, they are not criminals, they are not thieves, they are not killers. They are taking part in the struggle for freedom, for the liberation of Palestine from [Israeli] colonization and the continuous occupation. To be a Palestinian political prisoner is to be a political prisoner for freedom.”

“They need our support”

Speaking at a conference in Jerusalem, attended by more than 150 activists and relatives of Palestinian political prisoners, 50-year-old Mukhles Burgal, a former prisoner who spent time with Makhoul in prison, also expressed the importance of showing solidarity with Palestinian prisoners.

“We all have to do something really strong [for] them. They need our support,” Burgal, who spent 28 years in prison, said. “We knew about all the activities supporting us as political prisoners, and that had a very good effect on us.”

He added, “All the time you feel that you are in a war and you have to exist. To exist it doesn’t mean that you exist by yourself, but [with all the] people around you.”

At the moment, approximately 2,000 Palestinian prisoners are conducting an open-ended hunger strike to protest their mistreatment and lack of basic rights in Israeli jails. The campaign is the latest in a string of large-scale hunger strikes that began in late 2011, in protest of worsening prison conditions.

Recently, Palestinian prisoner Khader Adnan spent 66 days on hunger strike in protest of his imprisonment under an Israeli administrative detention order — without charge or trial — before being released in April.

Another prisoner, Hana al-Shalabi, also spent weeks on hunger strike, before being forcibly transfered to the Gaza Strip.

“Adnan has reaffirmed an important principle of resistance to colonialist regimes: when the people, or individuals, who are their victims remain resolute, the world will react. Sympathy turns into solidarity, and that in turn can nurture a growing movement of support for the struggle which is capable of shaking the foundations of the colonialist system,” Ameer Makhoul wrote in a letter from Gilboa prison in March.

“One of the major strengths of the campaign to support Adnan was that it told his personal human story, as well as of his life in politics and his struggle, in a manner that successfully conveyed both his suffering and his resolve. Adnan’s story also embodied the essence of the Palestinians’ experience and their quest for their rights and freedom, and serve to expose Israel’s essence for what it really is,” Makhoul continued.

“The case of Adnan proves that victory over the colonialist project is not a mission impossible. It is possible. And it has renewed and strengthened the hope that the Palestinian people are capable of energizing their free will — the will for victory.”

“We are persons and families”

Janan Abdu said that while she hoped her husband would be released from prison as soon as possible, she is realistic and knows that keeping him in jail is a priority of the Israeli government.

“The [Israeli] state wants Ameer to stay the full nine years in prison. What is so important, I think, is not to give up and to continue in our struggle and campaigning on the international level and locally,” she said.

“I do believe that intensive and continuous campaigning for Ameer and for other political prisoners has to affect Israel. Maybe at the beginning it won’t, but as the apartheid of South Africa ended, it could be that this regime will end also.

“This treatment has to be stopped. We are not statistics. We are persons and families.”

Jillian Kestler-D’Amours is a reporter and documentary filmmaker based in Jerusalem. More of her work can be found at http://jkdamours.com.

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More than 25 organisations around the world have combined to urge Israel to free imprisoned human rights defender Ameer Makhoul on the second anniversary of his arrest.

Ameer has been in prison since May 2010. On 1 May 2012, Ameer was transferred from Gilboa prison to another jail in Majido, allegedly as punishment for participating in a hunger strike to highlight the conditions of political prisoners in Israel. His family was not informed, and only found out about the move when they tried to visit him at Gilboa prison. The transfer of Ameer to Majido adds to the harassment being faced by his family by making it difficult for them to reach him.

Ameer has been Director of Ittijah: Union of Arab Community-Based Associations since it was established in 1995. He has also served as Chair of the Public Committee for the Defence of Political Freedoms of Arab Citizens in Israel, in addition to being a prolific writer on political, social and civil society issues in Israel.

The circumstances surrounding Ameer’s arrest by Israel’s Shin Bet security agency, and the consequent failure by the Israeli government to follow the due process of law immediately after his arrest, smack of harassment and political interference.

On 6 May 2010, 16 agents from Shin Bet burst into Ameer’s home in the middle of the night, searched it and confiscated laptops, hard drives, cell phones and a camera belonging to his family. Following his arrest, Ameer was detained incommunicado for 12 days, given no explanation of the charges against him and denied access to a lawyer. His detention was later extended by a court order and he was granted access to his legal team only after they threatened not to attend his detention extension hearing in court.

Ameer was subjected to intense interrogation sessions and charged with “assisting an enemy in time of war,” and contact with a foreign agent, which he denied. Under severe pressure from Israeli agents, in October 2010, Ameer entered a plea bargain stating that he “contacted a foreign agent and conspired to assist an enemy [Hezbollah] in a time of war.” As a result of the plea bargain, the more serious charge of “assisting an enemy in war” which carried a life sentence was withdrawn by the prosecution. He was sentenced to nine years in prison with an additional year’s suspended sentence.

We believe that Ameer Makhoul is a prisoner of conscience whose work to defend human rights in Israel has been wrongly curtailed. As such he should be immediately and unconditionally released to prevent the continuation of this travesty of justice.